[ ArgumentList ] vs. @( ArgumentList )

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Tuesday, November 06, 2012 22:53:36 Artur Skawina wrote:
> On 11/06/12 22:02, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> > On Tuesday, November 06, 2012 11:18:34 Walter Bright wrote:
> >> No hitting below the belt! Let the games begin!
> > 
> > Definitely @(ArgumentList). It fits with what other languages do, and it
> > matches what we're already doing for attributes. I also think that's what
> > pretty much everyone was figuring would be used for user-defined
> > attributes. The only major problem would be if @ArgumentList is allowed
> > when there's only a single argument, then code could break when new
> > built-in attributes are added.
> Easy - do not introduce any new *global* built-in attributes, ever. There's
> no reason why they all can't use the same look-up rules.

That's not really acceptable IMHO. Not being able to add new attributes to the 
language itself in the future is way too restrictive, and I expect that we'll 
come up with more that we want to add eventually. Designing custom attributes 
in a way that is guaranteed to conflict with that is a bad idea. We're 
restricting ourselves and causing problems for ourselves later when we could 
easily avoid doing so.

- Jonathan M Davis